SAN DIEGO — The man who planned to be president wakes up each morning now without a plan.

In other words, exactly what he would have been doing as President.

Mitt Romney looks out the windows of his beach house here in La Jolla, a moneyed and pristine enclave of San Diego, at noisy construction workers fixing up his next-door neighbor’s home, sending out regular updates on the renovation. He devours news from 2,600 miles away in Washington about the “fiscal cliff” negotiations, shaking his head and wondering what if.

Gone are the minute-by-minute schedules and the swarm of Secret Service agents. There’s no aide to make his peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches.

Can’t you feel his pain? No aides to make his peanut butter sandwiches. He’ll just have to settle for having one of the wait staff do it.

It’s not what Romney imagined he would be doing as the new year approaches.

Key word in this sentence: “imagined.”

The defeated Republican nominee has practically disappeared from public view since his loss, exhibiting the same detachment that made it so difficult for him to connect with the body politic through six years of running for president. He has made no public comments since his concession speech in the early hours of Nov. 7 and avoided the press last week during a private lunch with President Obama at the White House. Through an aide, Romney declined an interview request for this story.

After Romney told his wealthy donors that he blamed his loss on “gifts” Obama gave to minority groups, his functionaries were unrepentant and Republican luminaries effectively cast him out. Few of the policy ideas he promoted are even being discussed in Washington.

Which ought to give people a clue about how serious his “policy ideas” were in the first place.

As hard as this has been on the multi-millionaire, it’s even harder on his wife Ann. Not even her stable of horses can bring her solace, as she weeps in private.

By all accounts, the past month has been most difficult on Romney’s wife, Ann, who friends said believed up until the end that ascending to the White House was their destiny. They said she has been crying in private and trying to get back to riding her horses.

And the bitterness and anger at the 47% is never far below the surface.

In private, Romney has told friends he has little interest in helping the Republican Party rebuild and re-brand itself.

Advisers also said he felt no need to explain himself after his comments to donors about Obama using the power of incumbency to give ‘gifts’ to female, black and Latino voters leaked into the public sphere. One adviser said Romney regretted the remarks ‘coming out the way it did.’ Fehrnstrom, meanwhile, said, ‘He was expressing the frustration that any challenger would feel about an incumbent who used the powers of his incumbency ’ as we would have if the shoe was on the other foot.’